Triangle

Triangle
A time-loop thriller that flew under the radar on its initial release, this Christopher Smith-directed film keeps you guessing as Melissa George’s Jess ventures into an ocean liner carrying a future version of herself.

Trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17XqBdCiHOI

The Fountain

The Fountain
On the surface Darren Aronofsky’s wildly ambitious film was a love story about a doctor trying to save his wife from cancer, but this just happened to play out in three interwoven parallel stories with Hugh Jackman in each. The trippiest of them all saw his astronaut drifting through space in a biosphere containing the Tree of Life.

Trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYc-WdX5uaE

Mulholland Drive

There are probably enough movies in David Lynch’s back catalogue to fill their own dedicated mindf**k list, but it’s Mulholland Drive that has seemed to spark the most intrigue from film fans. With its tale of blurred identities and broken Hollywood dreams, it’s pure Lynch from start to finish.

Trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQ5Q0CHQ0EU

Inception

Christopher Nolan’s dreams-within-dreams blockbuster kept cinema goers’ collective grey matter on overdrive throughout before delivering a colossal mindf**k in its closing minutes with that spinning top moment.

Trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hP9D6kZseM

Soundtrack: (Hans Zimmer) Awesome soundtrack
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5IailIzqdc

Memento

Christopher Nolan’s second feature plays out in reverse order as protagonist Leonard Shelby battles his inability to make new memories as he hunts down his wife’s killer. It’s a smart-as-a-whip juggling act of narrative concealment and psychological intrigue.

Trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vS0E9bBSL0

The Game

Starring Michael Douglas and Sean Penn, the Game is a true entertainment movie, which offers you all the feelings a person can feel. Sadness, anger, fear, happiness, empathy and not knowing what comes next and oh yeah, MINDBLOWNESS. The director David Fincher is a master of his own right, having directed Fight Club, Social Network, Seven and Curious Case of Benjamin Button amongst others…but you can definitely see a pattern here, right. I wonder what happened to David when he was a kid, who messed up with his morning cereal… The ending of this one is, in this writers opinion, one of the best of movie history and will go down as the benchmark of thriller mindfuck movies

Trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLauqDChQGs

Cube

Cube
In some ways a precursor to Saw (though vastly superior), Vincenzo Natali’s mystery threw together a handful of strangers and made them navigate an endless maze of deadly traps. Those of you who screamed what?! in the finale can check the cube’s origins and creators in prequel Cube Zero.

Trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Esjc0rPj3K4

Synecdoche, New York

Synecdoche, New York
Charlie Kaufman sat behind the camera for this sprawling tale of a director mounting an ambitious stage show in a Manhattan warehouse. The lines of reality and fiction become increasingly blurred in a film that’s at times both bold and utterly confusing.

Trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIizh6nYnTU

Primer

Shane Carruth’s microbudget debut about the creation of time travel is so densely-packed with detail and myriad complex timelines you need a flowchart to work it all out. Thankfully, there is one!
http://i.imgur.com/6WIgNZq.png

Trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqx32xkATrY

Oldboy

Torture, incest and an octopus being eaten alive are just a few of the WTF moments in Park Chan-wook’s sensational drama. An American remake is on the horizon, but it’ll almost certainly not pack the same punch as the original.

Trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKz_AUF0GcU

Pi

Darren Aronofsky’s low-budget breakthrough saw mathematician Max Cohen drive himself to the brink while trying to unravel the mystery of a 216-digit number his computer churns out. Plagued by crippling headaches and hallucinations, Max self-administers a trepanning with a power drill in the film’s greatest mindf**k moment.

Trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jo18VIoR2xU

Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind

Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind
Michel Gondry and Charlie Kaufman’s terrific blend of sci-fi and romance earns its place on the mindf**k list by virtue of the fact that protagonist Joel Barrish (Jim Carrey) is having parts of his memories – notably his relationship with Kate Winslet’s free sprit Clementine – zapped away.

Trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GiLxkDK8sI

Fight Club

Fight Club
David Fincher’s razor-sharp satire on crumbling masculinity and capitalism run amok delivered one of the great mind-bending plot twists with the revelation that Edward Norton’s nameless narrator is in fact Brad Pitt’s Tyler Durden. 14 years on it still leaves you reeling.

Trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUXWAEX2jlg

Vanilla Sky

Vanilla Sky
This Tom Cruise-fronted remake of Spanish thriller Open Your Eyes closes with the A-lister plummeting from a skyscraper before awakening just before the final fade to black. There are several different interpretations – some highlighted by Cameron Crowe in the director’s commentary – but part of the fun is letting your mind find its own conclusion.

Trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k09OX40NLUw

Berberian Sound Studio

Berberian Sound Studio
Berberian Sound Studio (2012) Toby Jones plays a sound engineer hired to work on an Italian giallo movie in Peter Strickland’s excellent psychological horror. As Jones’s Gilderoy starts to crack under the strain of seeing so much bloody imagery and a dangerously aroused goblin, the film takes a swift turn into the demented.

Trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKOPh5ZEciQ

Videodrome

Videodrome
David Cronenberg’s sci-fi body horror famously featured a hallucinatory sequence of James Woods inserting a VHS tape into his abdomen. The Canadian filmmaker has made many films since, but nothing quite as WTF as this.

Trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFHey3utk0I

Altered States

Altered States
Ken Russell and screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky teamed up to adapt the latter’s novel Altered States in the early ’80s. William Hurt took on the lead role as a scientist whose experiments with hallucinogenic drugs in an isolation chamber naturally lead to some crazy kaleidoscopic imagery.

Trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67lYG7a4YOA

2001: A Space Odyssey

Stanley Kubrick’s sci-fi epic split critics on its initial release, probably thanks in part to the head-spinning climax which saw astronaut David ultimately transformed into the Star Child. Time has been 2001’s friend, though. Now it’s rightly regarded as a masterpiece.

Trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6ywMnbef6Y

Holy Motors

If you like your mindf**k movies to feature motion-capture sex scenes, a dwarf taking Eva Mendes hostage and Kylie Minogue then Leos Carax’s Holy Motors is the film for you. It’s delirious, deranged and completely captivating.

Trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQJrVEgOPRk

Eraserhead

Eraserhead
David Lynch’s first feature-length film, a black and white surrealist horror, was a clear statement of intent from the American director, a signal that he will never be one to do things by the book. Franz Kafka and Nikolai Gogol were both inspirations for this wild trip into the human headspace.

Trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dU7OqGCIcak

Donnie Darko

Donnie Darko
Richard Kelly’s directorial debut featured a talking 6-foot rabbit, a falling jet engine, time travel and a cavalcade of different interpretations and online theories. The filmmaker continued with his movie mind-bending in Southland Tales and The Box, but neither were a match for Donnie Darko.

Trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qdKbNuhXWvQ